Hungary on Turkey’s side, says Orbán in Ankara

Hungary will stick by its friends and is on Turkey‘s side, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said in Ankara on Friday at the opening of a Hungarian-Turkish business forum.

Hungary’s backing of Turkey is not a one-off event but the consequence of a strategy, Orbán said. “Being a conservative country, it is human values that matter.” “Business is important, but what’s most important is that one should have friends,” he said. There are some obligations that result from this and Hungary will stick by its friends, “even when this is uncomfortable”, he added.

“No matter what anti-Turkish manifestations there are in important European countries, Hungary will never join these”, but will take Turkey’s side, Orbán said.

Turkey is on the edge of Europe and it is protecting what is inside Europe, the prime minister said. Had it not fulfilled this obligation, Europe would have been flooded by many millions of migrants and “we would not be able to handle that”, he said. “Turkey deserves respect for this, which we will always give it.”

“If I were Turkish, at first sight I would not pay that much attention to the Hungarian economy because Turkey will soon become the largest country in Europe; much larger than Hungary,” Orbán said. “At the same time, Hungary, with a population of 10 million, is able to produce exports worth 110 billion US dollars compared to Turkey with a population of 80 million producing exports of 145 billion dollars,” he added.

He said Turkish businessmen should look to Hungary as “Europe’s most secure country”. While public safety is deteriorating in Europe, Hungary is secure and predictable and its taxes are low, with a 9 percent corporate tax rate and one of Europe’s lowest personal income tax rates, while there is no inheritance tax, he added.

Orbán noted Hungary’s membership of the Visegrad Group, saying that the V4 together provided a large contribution to European economic growth and the point of gravity of economic performance was shifting from the west to central Europe.

A visit by Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Budapest as prime minister in 2013 gave great impetus to cooperation and business links. The target set at the time was to boost Hungarian-Turkish economic relations to reach 5 billion dollars. There are multiple reasons why this has not happened yet. Notwithstanding some progress, no breakthrough has been experienced in business relations, he said. This is why political decisions and flagships are now being sought to achieve this goal, Orbán said.